The photorealistic visualisation of lighting-scenarios with the help of virtual 3d city models is gaining importance as a tool, helping to make decisions in the process of planning. This form of presentation makes sense to every spectator very quickly and in a definite way, thus it makes collaboration easy especially in interdisciplinary planning teams. Moreover the light-planner has the possibility to check his design in a virtual surrounding and therefore gain additional reliability for his planning. The displayed, exemplary, workflow and the techniques belonging to it, allow to show situations during the course of planning and to present the current state of planning realistically. Hence the quality of planning can be enduringly improved, through experimental use of new materials and ideas. Moreover alternative planning that does not show the right results can be eliminated very early in planning process, with not need for special investments to do so. The World Heritage Site of Bamberg consists of nearly 1000 individual buildings.
In addition to that are historic and cultural outstanding monuments like the cathedral of Bamberg. To preserve the aesthetic entirety of the city, it is important, to the setting of lighting-installations and the “daily” lighting, to archive a continuous illumination adequate to the memorial. These hotspots are being displayed as examples in the World Heritage Site of Bamberg. The paper is a compilation of one approved dissertation with the title “Realtime Planning – Interactive and virtual methods and models in spatial Planning/ in german: Echtzeitplanung – Interaktive und virtuelle Methoden und Modelle für die Planung” and a prospective dissertation with the working title “Light planning systems and methods for illumination (world) heritage sites – A comparison between Germany and Egypt. In the Realtime Planning work, the author figured out inter alia in different best practice example the use of digital city models the practical use of virtual city models, e.g. for digital light planning. The other work will compare different digital lighting methods and the practical use in different planning cultures. In both case, the dissertation supervisor is Prof. Dr.-Ing. Bernd Streich, Technical University Kaiserslautern